ISBN: 978-1-4051-2922-0
Reviewed by Derek A.McDougall (ku.oc.llaguodcamkered|kered#ku.oc.llaguodcamkered|kered) in August 2008.

Towards the end of 1985, as Peter Hacker reports in the third essay of this collection, the fruitful collaboration he had enjoyed for the best part of ten years with Gordon Baker on matters of Wittgenstein scholarship and interpretation, began to break down over fundamental questions relating to Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and philosophical method (1). That breakdown, and the subsequent posthumous publication of Gordon Baker's collected essays expressing his new approach to Wittgenstein, in a book edited by Katherine Morris (2), provide both the background to, and the raison d'etre for the present volume, in which a number of prominent scholars pay homage, directly or indirectly, to Baker in a wide-ranging selection of twelve papers which - in addition to a fine introduction from the editors - are for the most part of exceptionally high quality.

The fundamental point of disagreement, as presented by Hacker in his long-awaited official account of the break-up, rests on Baker's therapeutic, one-to-one person-relative assessment of Wittgenstein's methodology, which is said to bear a close relation to Freudian psycho-analysis. Concentrating on the alleviation of individual neuroses, this method is in complete contrast to that of Hacker's Wittgenstein who presents philosophical arguments against 'dualism or behaviourism in philosophy of mind, or Platonism or Intuitionism in philosophy of mathematics' (3). But in spite of Hacker's surely justified railings against any attempt to associate Wittgenstein's oeuvre with the more extreme forms of this kind of Freudian psychotherapy, which Wittgenstein in any event repudiated as an account of his work, particularly in his well-known objection to Ayer's 1946, BBC radio broadcast (4), nowhere in Baker's output do we really come close to the outlook and presentation found, for example, in O.K. Bouwsma, who says of Wittgenstein: 'His problem is always someone, an individual in trouble. This someone is his troubler, a man in language-trouble. This man says something. What he says is like a rash…….Something compels him to say this……One has, accordingly, to…..discover what he may be persuaded compels him to say this. To uncover is to remove it and the compulsion.' (5).

For mainstream admirers of Wittgenstein, any attempt along similar lines to present the Philosophical Investigations as a Dr. Findlay's Casebook of those intellectual cramps referred to by Ayer, would be regarded as at best a mildly amusing misrepresentation, or at worst a gross and unpardonable distortion of the aims and methods exhibited within one of the most original philosophical classics of the Twentieth Century. Yet in spite of the therapeutic outlook which Baker does find in Wittgenstein, there are passages, in which he discusses early 1930's statements from the Nachlass, where he is much more reserved in attributing the practice of this psycho-analytic model to Wittgenstein, rather than just to Waismann alone: The analogy with psycho-analysis is not developed very far or at all systematically in these or other texts, and this makes it impossible to establish exactly what Wittgenstein had in mind in drawing it (6).

Nevertheless, Baker is attracted by the fact that it seemed to have struck Waismann as a key with which to unlock Wittgenstein's method, and for that reason, and as an object of comparison, he is led to explore features of this psycho-analytic model, even although this 'may well be more extensive and more definite than anything Wittgenstein himself had in mind' (7). So is Hacker attacking a straw man? The simple answer is that from one perspective, this overly psycho-analytic approach turns out to be something of a red herring when we come to read these papers of Baker's in detail, with their freshness of approach, their attempts to come to terms, for example, with Wittgenstein's notion of a picture and how it relates to a whole range of issues including the description of Augustine's account of learning a language (8). Baker succeeds in taking us further and further away from the earlier traditional approach he shared with Hacker, where the role of pictures as right or wrong conceptions, for example, blurs the distinction between the role of a picture in our ordinary thinking and the way in which we can come to see it as having an application in a philosophical context (Cf. Investigations, par. 295).

Indeed, if we see Baker's new approach in the right light, then even the function of philosophical therapy itself requires re-assessment. Therapy only gains its function, after all, from the adoption of a certain methodology, and it is the significance of the methodology, rather than what for many is the rather off-putting notion of therapy, which places Wittgenstein at the centre of a new way of looking at the problems of philosophy. A great many of the things that a philosopher might wish to say, for example, about the representational content of his perceptual experiences, the intrinsically meaningful character of his sensations or, indeed, about the reality of mathematical facts, gain for Wittgenstein what sense they do have only from the perspective of someone who has already attained mastery of a (public) language. This is a central feature of his thinking (captured in Investigations, par.114) displacing the importance traditionally attached in philosophy to pronouncements resulting from supposedly private metaphysical reflection.

Katherine Morris, following her earlier introduction to Baker's essays, provides an extended account of 'Early, Middle and Later Baker', each of whom reflects an important facet of the development of Wittgenstein interpretation in general; though it almost goes without saying that it is the Later Baker who takes prominence in her account, the Baker who, along with those Continental philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche of whose work she approves, seeks with Wittgenstein to dispel philosophical dogma and prejudice.

In a characteristic piece entitled 'Perspectives on Wittgenstein' with the apt rider 'An Intermittently Opinionated Survey', Hans-Johann Glock provides an interesting history of Wittgenstein reception, from early reactions to the Tractatus from Russell, Ramsey, and The Vienna Circle, to initial reflections on the Philosophical Investigations from Hampshire, Malcolm, Strawson and Feyerabend; although one can find one's self irritated by comments made on the brief fly-by: the claim, for example, that David Pole's early critical monograph on the later philosophy 'set a trend for later negative assessments' by Findlay and Cook (9). In fact, although Glock mentions in passing Stanley Cavell's reaction to Pole's book, it is primarily because of this that Pole's analysis is remembered at all. J.N. Findlay is regarded as one of the great scholars of his generation who criticised Wittgenstein from a mystical Neo-Platonic, not to say Hegelian standpoint; and John Cook, despite his later negative re-assessment and resulting departure from his academic post, wrote some highly popular early papers including 'Human Beings', which are still quoted in support of Wittgenstein today. Glock speedily passes by the intervening years, mentioning Kripke, Von Savigny, and the Baker and Hacker commentaries, before applying a
decisive Occam's Razor to the proliferation of Wittgensteins added to by some commentators in the wake of an assumption that On Certainty reveals yet a further shift in Wittgenstein's overall perspective. Glock quickly disposes of the concept of 'The New Wittgenstein', belittling a debate, in the course of souring international relations, which he refers to as 'overheated, over-hyped and over here' (10). Opposing the irrationalism he suspects is at its heart, he objects to the idea that there is only one kind of nonsense, Cora Diamond's 'sheer gibberish'. Here, however, Glock may have a point, for whatever may be said about the Tractatus, when Wittgenstein states in a quite specific context in the Investigations that when a sentence is called senseless it is not as it were its sense that is senseless (par. 500), what he is saying is, not that because it has no sense it is sheer gibberish, but that although it may indeed have sense, it has no real application. Glock ends his essay with a surely justifiable expression of regret that Wittgenstein studies have lost contact with mainstream analytic philosophy, to the detriment of both sides.

Covering some of the same ground as Glock's entertaining essay is Alois Pichler's exploration of the distinctions between text immanent v contextual and theory v therapy approaches to Wittgenstein's texts. Introducing the notion of 'skandala' to describe apparent inconsistencies and contradictions in Wittgenstein's presentation, which Pichler takes to be reconcilable with what he terms Gordon Baker's psychoanalytic-therapeutic understanding of the Investigations - inconsistencies which on a conventional theoretical reading would almost bound to be regarded as stylistic shortcomings - he argues a case for a wholly therapy-governed person-specific rendering of the later Wittgenstein. Pichler argues convincingly that the Philosophical Investigations is a highly structured work, whatever may be said about 'therapy', and this lends a certain irony to the idea, often proposed, that an easier understanding of Wittgenstein's later philosophy can be obtained from The Blue and Brown Books, when his entire methodology points towards the conclusion that his style and presentation is integral to the content which the later work succeeds in expressing. Here one should consider, for example, the entire range of passages in which the private object model is given its own pictorial representation in a form in which this very model is undermined and therefore shown to have no application through the internal structure of the examples themselves, e.g., the indifference shown in par. 270 to the concept of correct or incorrect identification when the very notion of identification cannot arise.

Both Joachim Schulte in his extended essay and Hilary Putnam in his shorter piece direct their attention to a paper of Gordon Baker's, 'Wittgenstein on Metaphysical/Everyday Use' (Ibid.), in which Baker takes the significant word in the well-known last paragraph of Investigations par. 116, which tells us that what 'we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use', to be 'metaphysical' rather than 'everyday'. The simplest way to attack this question is to treat Wittgenstein as saying that words have no (legitimate) metaphysical use and, insofar as we are tempted in philosophy to think that they have, their use then becomes problematic and therefore segregated from the grammar of the everyday language enshrined in the practice of ascribing the words in question. The classic conundrum here rests in the ascription of thoughts, feelings and sensations to others, where the problem of other minds arises because in philosophy we can become party to a picture in which we take our understanding of the practice to consist. Yet in a quite ordinary context, this picture - that there are things going on in him in the way in which they go on in me - can be given an application in which it can be taken per se to be quite unproblematic. This outlook on Wittgenstein is perfectly consistent with Baker's insofar as it at least agrees with him in regarding the function of everyday use to have nothing to do with the 'standard speech-patterns of the English-speaking peoples' (Ibid.). It would, equally, be quite at odds with the attitude of G.E.Moore, for example, who as a philosopher did believe, adopting a common sense outlook as a metaphysical standpoint, that other people really do have thoughts and feelings in the way that he really did himself.

Joachim Schulte reminds native-born English speakers of something that they are only too easily inclined to forget, that the Investigations is actually a translation of a German original, a tribute to the canonical status that the Anscombe translation has attained. No matter how fluent he may have been in the English language, Wittgenstein's attempt to translate The Brown Book into German was, from his own point of view, almost bound to be an (aesthetic) disaster. He had to begin again. Schulte investigates the detailed nuances in German of the disputed word 'metaphysical' in Wittgenstein's work, and arrives at a very complex picture, whilst Hilary Putnam charges Baker with giving an unduly restricted account of the word itself, one which would not allow Wittgenstein or 'Wittgensteinians' to say anything about four crucial questions: Dummett's realism v anti-realism distinction as an account of the semantics of 'true'; functionalism in the philosophy of mind; the innateness hypothesis in
linguistics; and realism, nominalism and quasi-realism in mathematics. Yet these are all cases in which Wittgenstein would regard the adoption of these kinds of philosophical standpoints as an attempt to escape from a confusion, one consequent upon the temptation to become party to a misleading picture. On this assessment, there is nothing that could count as proving functionalism or the innateness hypothesis to be true as empirical hypotheses in Putnam's terms, because there is nothing that could count as evidence for or against the application of a confused picture of this kind.

David Stern more than adequately fulfils his brief in a detailed account of the genesis and historical development of Wittgenstein interpretation in regard to one passage, Investigations, par. 293. The Beetle in The Box has become notorious, along with par. 258 and par. 265 in particular, because of its association with reductio ad absurdum accounts in which Wittgenstein has been assumed to have demolished traditional scepticism about other minds, or the possibility of a private language. Stern proves to be a highly reliable guide through the mire of interpretation and misinterpretation, showing himself to be an unusually balanced adjudicator in leading the reader along a historical route towards Gordon Baker's re-assessment of The Private Language Argument. Refusing for the most part to take sides, he carefully assesses the significance of the opposing standpoints at any particular period in furthering the ongoing debate. A succession of familiar figures including Malcolm and Strawson, Pitcher, Donegan and early Cook, all have their say in a debate in which, as has so often happened in Wittgenstein interpretation, the issues at stake become increasingly distanced either from any genuine consideration of Wittgenstein's methodology or, indeed, from the text itself. It is now perfectly plain, for example, re-reading the texts again today, that Strawson completely misconstrues Wittgenstein's notion of privacy when he asks in his Review whether we ever do in practice sometimes misremember how to use our ordinary sensation terms, and when he suggests that a private language could be used to talk about material objects or animals. Yet Malcolm equally misconstrues Strawson when he accuses him of suggesting that a private language could be introduced in abstraction from any ordinary context when it is clear that Strawson's idea of a private language bears little relation to Wittgenstein's own. These misunderstandings serve as a reminder of how difficult it must have been to truly engage with Wittgenstein's originality in these early days. They also pose the disturbing question whether we, benefiting from hindsight, would have fared any better in coming blind to the Investigations for the first time (11).

If there is one aspect of Ray Monk's treatment of the historical reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics which stands out, it lies is his reference to Drury's comment that 'wellmeaning commentators…..make it appear that his writings were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against (12). This, however, makes it even more regrettable for Monk that just as his philosophy of mathematics is now receiving the sympathetic attention it deserves, this should be from scholars devoted to what has now become a narrowly specialised field, so much so that those interested in other aspects of Wittgenstein's work may not be persuaded to study it. This would be, to use Chihara's distinction mentioned by Monk (13), a 'left wing' complaint mirroring its 'right wing' counterpart from Glock that Wittgenstein scholarship has become divorced from mainstream analytic philosophy. The other side of the coin is that Wittgenstein has now become an important cultural icon whose work is understood to have relevance to fields as diverse as sociology, the arts, literature, politics, ethics and religion; even if in some of these what he actually did say about them may appear to be extremely limited. Nevertheless, Monk bemoans the fact that Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics has not so far found the sympathetic interpreter who would understand his writings in the spirit in which he intended them to be understood (14). But, of course, the spirit in which the work is written is no more separable from the work than the style in which its content is expressed, and to the extent that this content is captured in the claim, for example, that those who talk about the objective reality of mathematical facts are subject to a misleading picture, then in this respect there is really nothing more to be said. Any attempt to infuse an external cultural perspective into the exegisis of particular passages, for example, would be to make a mockery of their content. In fact, Monk, following Gerrard (15), does sympathise with an account in which mathematicians in their philosophical moments have a tendency to become party to a misleading picture, one which in its own way is arguably a perfectly harmless accompaniment of the quite ordinary practice in which we express our understanding of the objectivity of mathematical proof, but which in a philosophical context we can be inclined to treat as providing a very special kind of access to a reality in which this understanding can be taken to consist. Once again, there is nothing wrong per se with the picture, which in its ordinary unreflective guise is from Wittgenstein's perspective doing no real work at all. Here Monk is gesturing towards the point, essential to an general understanding of Wittgenstein's method, that the kinds of things a mathematician or a philosopher might want to say about access to a reality of mathematical facts gain what sense they do have from the mathematician's or philosopher's existing mastery of a public language in which he comes to grasp, in a perfectly ordinary sense, what it is to understand and master a mathematical proof. Monk approves of what he takes to be Gordon Baker's assessment of the philosopher's therapeutic task in this context, viz., to replace the disputed picture with another picture which does not give rise to confusion. Whilst this is not incorrect, it might be better to say that Wittgenstein deals with the effect the picture can have in a philosophical context by drawing attention instead to the circumstances in we come to use and understand the concepts which are germane to the field in question. This is because the use of these concepts is enshrined in the practice of mathematics, or in the practice of talking about each other's mental lives, our thoughts, feelings, expectations and desires, no matter what extraneous pictures might have come to be associated with them.

But now it may seem that by talking in this way about Wittgenstein's methodology, an answer has already been provided to A.W.Moore's question in his essay 'Wittgenstein and Transcendental Idealism' whether either the early or the later Wittgenstein was a transcendental idealist. For to adopt this approach is already to sidestep all the difficulties attending talk of a reality in principle beyond our ken, as a condition of the possibility of talking about a reality which is within our ken. This picture, however it is filled in - e.g., with grammar in the later philosophy taking over the roll of the logical form of a proposition in the early - involves an inevitable dichotomy resulting solely from the attempt to view Wittgenstein's methodology from within the Procrustean bed of a Kantian framework. Moore views both Investigations par. 103 and 114, for example, as sounding like expressions of transcendental idealism. Yet if we see it aright, the content of par. 114 can be construed as making the claim that a philosopher who says that our perceptual experiences have representational content, or that his sensation of pain already comes to him with a distinct qualitative feel, which tells him what kind of sensation it is, is saying something that gains what sense it has solely because he is already master of a public language: it is for this reason that these expressions, innocuous in themselves, are from one perspective not in dispute except when the attempt is made to grant them a special kind of application in a philosophical context; for they are then being viewed in isolation from their ordinary contexts of application. From this perspective, Moore's example, Zettel par. 357, referring to what is both arbitrary and non-arbitrary in the application of the terms in a colour or in a number system, is making the same point: that the very question Wittgenstein asks, viz., whether the systems reside in our nature or in the nature of things, is not a legitimate question if it is pointing to anything other than the conclusion that a philosopher is being party to a picture which is doing no real work when he insists, for example, that, the practice of mathematics points to our acquaintance with a reality of mathematical facts. Yet what he is saying would not even gain what sense he attributes to it in philosophy, without his already having acquired mastery of a public language. But in that case, the point made by Bernard Williams that Wittgenstein's later philosophy points in the direction of transcendental idealism, is misconceived if it is taken to be making a philosophical point based on the assumption that the question Wittgenstein asks is even legitimate (17). Whether the Tractatus can be read in a similar kind of light is a question which is very much in dispute, and although Moore suggests in his stimulating essay that the Tractatus is certainly more amenable than the Investigations to an interpretation in transcendental idealist terms, this is quite obviously based on giving that work a metaphysical interpretation. Yet one of the prime motivations for certain new readings of the Tractatus, bringing its underlying methodology in line with that of the Investigations, is to see Wittgenstein as having a unity of purpose throughout his work, one which would regard the question whether he is or is not committed in the Tractatus to making claims about an independently constituted reality as itself a symptom of confusion. Yet this is the interesting question that Marie McGinn raises in her essay. Following earlier interpretations from predecessors like Winch, Ishiguro, McGuiness and Rhees, McGinn carefully treads a middle path between the metaphysically realist readings of, amongst others, Anscombe, Black and Kenny, and the new resolute proposals of Diamond and Conant (18). Supporting her thesis that the Winch - Ishiguro treatment is on the right lines, are her discoveries, resulting from a close study of the Notebooks pre-dating both the Protractatus and the Tractatus itself, that the metaphysical role often attributed to the important notion of simples, and regarded as the greatest challenge to her interpretation, can be accommodated: What I want to argue is that the idea that the question about simples is to be understood as a question about the essential nature of symbolism in which states of affairs are represented means that it cannot be the case that the argument for simples involves any hypothetical claim about the ultimate constituents of an independently constituted reality (19).

But this raises a distinction between the asking of a legitimate philosophical question, an activity in which from one perspective McGinn is surely engaged as a matter of scholarship, and the treatment of this philosophical question as itself a symptom of confusion; for this is an inevitable consequence of the Diamond/Conant reading. The response to this distinction then determines how Wittgenstein's apparent commitment to a metaphysical reading in the Notebooks, albeit with an apparent tension pointing towards his supposedly later recognition of symbolism solely as a means of representation, is itself to be interpreted. If disputes over this point are not then to go round and round in a circle, as they usually tend to do, then the way forward can only rest on the adoption of principles of interpretation which cannot themselves be matters solely of scholarship. McGinn's essay makes it perfectly clear, as is so often the case in philosophy, that where the emphasis falls can be a very delicate matter, determined apparently as much by intuition as by rational assessment of the scholarly evidence. Here it perhaps ought to go without saying that when Wittgenstein looks down from the position he has reached after throwing away the ladder in 6.54, it makes a significant difference whether the propositions he recognises as senseless are not 'sheer gibberish', but are rather statements which have no application. On this assessment, still compatible with the idea that there is a unity of approach throughout his work, one is able to adopt a rather less austere conception of what he is throwing away. Marie McGinn's essay has the unique distinction amongst the twelve of making no mention of Gordon Baker whatsoever.

Another author whose essay connects with a recent book is Stephen Mulhall (20), who bravely explores in a manner similar to that employed in his recent volume the idea of the ethical as it applies to the Tractatus, coming to the conclusion, based partly on an understanding of 6.53, that the correct way to go about doing 'moral philosophy' is to recognise that, as a branch of philosophy with a distinct subject matter, there is no such subject at all so that, as Mulhall puts it: ''Saying only what can be said whatever the topic under consideration (…perhaps by striving to construct an adequate scientific theory, or an accurate account of a historical episode, or an accurate solution to a problem in engineering…) is just as much an expression of one's happiness as one's avoidance of empty philosophical reflection. Achieving such acceptance in every aspect of oneΥs life is precisely the way in which the 'ethical problem' is solved - or rather it is the way in which the appearance of such a problem is entirely dissolved, leaving behind the only genuine problems there are.'' (21)

Reading Mulhall on ethics in the Tractatus leads one to appreciate why so many philosophers including, for example, even such famous commentators as Ramsey (22), and also Marie McGinn in her new work (23), avoid discussing this issue altogether. It is not that the subject is intractable, but rather that it does not admit of the kind of determinate answer that, if they are doing their job, philosophers often think it their sworn duty to supply.

Approaching the question of ethics in Wittgenstein's philosophy from an entirely different direction, Alice Crary considers the work of Philippa Foot in the domain of moral philosophy and reaches remarkably similar conclusions to Stephen Mulhall regarding the dimension of the ethical in Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole. For Crary, 'where the connections of thought a person is making substantively depend for their (at least apparent) integrity on her view of what matters most in life, we will be correct to classify her thought as moral without regard to its subject matter' (24). Crary regards her approach as bearing a certain similarity to Gordon Baker's in considering 'neglected aspects' of Wittgenstein's work, without undertaking 'the kind of rigourously detailed textual investigation that is Baker's signature…' (25), a point surely justified by the fact that in this particular case the evidence is far from being as direct as it is in those fields to which Baker mostly directed his attention.

The Introduction from the three editors is a model of its kind. In 36 pages they manage to provide a detailed account of just about every relevant aspect of Wittgenstein interpretation one might care to mention, from the historical reception of his two major works, the prevalence of both orthodox theoretical and purely therapeutic conceptions, influence on mainstream analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein reception on the Continent of Europe, considerations of style and method, followed by brief overviews of the essays themselves. If the main function of a book like this is to stimulate readers to thoughts of their own, then it succeeds admirably in its task.

As do most philosophers, Derek McDougall fondly remembers the publication of his very first paper. This was in MIND in 1972. He has, however, continued to worry whether Gilbert Ryle's comment that 'the matter is stated well and almost interestingly' referred more to the quality of its treatment rather than to Ryle's aversion to the nature of its subject (religious belief). Other papers have appeared in organs including PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH and PHILOSOPHIA. His latest, on Wittgenstein, appears in the 2008 edition of JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH, 14.

Copyright@ Derek McDougall & BWS 2008.

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